While I am on the subject of old photographs, I wanted to share a heartwarming story that started with one old  photograph.

The photo was one I found mixed in with a bunch of old black and white photographs that had been my parents. I could immediately identify my very young parents in the photo. My mother is the woman in the back with the sleeveless white top. Standing behind her, the man in the suit and tie with dark hair is my father. When I looked more closely at the photo, I realized that my grandmother, Gussie Brotman Goldschlager, is standing to the left of my mother (on my mother’s right), and then all the way in the back left corner almost at the door with only his eyes and nose showing is my grandfather, Isadore Goldschlager.

Who are these people??

But I did not recognize one other person in the photo. Who were all those people with my parents and grandparents? I had no one to ask since my grandparents and my parents are no longer living, nor are any of their peers. But I was determined to try and find out. First I distributed the photo by email to all my Goldschlager and Brotman relatives. Did anyone recognize anyone in the photo? No one did. These did not appear to be my relatives.

I then had what turned out to be a brilliant idea. My grandparents and my parents all lived in Parkchester, a community of apartment buildings in the Bronx that was built in the early 1940s. My mother and her parents had moved there when she was about eleven in 1941 or 1942. Then after my parents married in 1951, my parents had an apartment there also. It was my first home. I hypothesized that the photograph might have been taken in Parkchester in the early 1950s. We moved away in 1957, and my parents looked really, really young here—it may have been taken even before I was born in 1952.

I searched to see if there was a Facebook group for people who once lived in Parkchester, and sure enough, there is one. I posted the photograph there, saying that the photograph was probably taken in the early 1950s and asking if anyone recognized anyone in the photograph. I received numerous comments about living in Parkchester in those years, but no one knew anyone in the photo.

Until, that is, a woman named Gail (Lipman) Amsterdam responded and said that her grandparents, her father, and several other people she knew were in the photograph. And even more incredible—she herself was the little girl sitting on the floor in the front of the photograph. I was totally blown away. Gail is sitting on her grandmother’s lap, and her grandfather is sitting behind her. Gail’s father, Sid Lipman, is the man in the center with the glasses. We assume that her mother either took the picture or was in the kitchen when it was taken.

I learned that Gail had lived in the same building and on the same floor as my grandparents when she was a little girl and that she remembers them. She described them as kind and lovely people. And even more amazing—she remembers my grandparents’ cat and described him perfectly! She even remembers that his name was Rajah. She told me that my grandmother used to let her “borrow” Rajah and take him back to her apartment to play with her. I had a serious case of chills and tears as I read the email in which she shared this with me.  Here was someone I never met who remembered my grandparents and Rajah, who eventually became our cat when my grandmother no longer could care for him. It felt magical.

Rajah (cleverly misspelled by me at ten years old!)

Then I asked Gail about the other people in the photograph. She identified everyone else except for one woman. I told her that I was going to try and locate any relatives of those people because they also might enjoy seeing the photo. Gail said that all the people she knew in the photograph were deceased and that as far as she knew there were no living descendants. One couple did have a son, but in researching the family, I learned that that son had died in the last few years and had had no children or spouse who survived him.

As for the other three adults in the photo, one was Gail’s mother’s best friend, Helen Frankenstein Kaiserman (the woman holding Gail’s doll on her lap), and the two men standing on the right in the rear were Helen’s brothers Morris and Jerome Frankenstein. According to Gail, none of those three had children. Helen had been briefly married but was divorced by the time Gail knew her, and Gail believed that Jerome and Morris had never married.

But I was curious to learn more about the three siblings—Morris, Jerome, and Helen. I just couldn’t accept that there were no living relatives in this family. I turned to Ancestry and began to research the family and soon found them on the 1930 and 1940 census along with their parents and two other siblings. Maybe the other siblings had had children who might be interested in the photo?

In the course of doing that research, however, I stumbled upon an Ancestry tree that had Morris, Jerome, and Helen included. That tree was owned by a researcher named Renate Valencia, and I was surprised to see that according to her tree, Morris had married and had had children. Since his widow and children were still living, their names did not show up on the tree, so I decided to send Renate a message through Ancestry to learn more.

I didn’t have to wait long to hear from her. She was very excited to hear about the photograph and knew that her husband Steve, Morris’ son, would be delighted to see a photograph of his father, uncle, and aunt. Gail was surprised and happy to learn that in fact Morris had married and had had children. I connected Gail and Renate to each other, and they have been exchanging memories and asking and answering questions about the people in the photograph.

Renate sent me this link to a documentary about Parkchester, and it brought back many memories of visiting my grandmother there, going to Macy’s, playing in the playgrounds, chasing pigeons near the fountain, and taking the bright red elevator up to my grandmother’s apartment where once upon a time Gail had lived across the hall. Gail and I may have even ridden in that elevator at the same time, not knowing that all these years later we would connect through the magic of the internet and an old photograph.

All of this would never have been possible without the magic of photographs and the tricks of the internet. Without Facebook and Ancestry, I never would have found Gail or Renate. I never would have learned about the people in that photograph. Now I just wish that I could tell my parents and my grandparents this story and learn more about their memories of that evening and of the people in the photograph.

Can you imagine what all those people in the photograph would think if they knew that seventy or so years after that photograph was taken, three strangers would spend time remembering them all and sharing a magical experience like this? I still get the chills and a bit teary when I think about it.